Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Our replay of Charlie Schluting's excellent Networking 101 series continues with a two-part dissection of TCP. Understanding the ubiquitous TCP is key to troubleshooting networking communications.

Supercomputer maker has introduced the CX1, a small and low-cost supercomputer running Microsoft's new HPC Server 2008. The system is scheduled for official release Sept. 22. Aimed at users across a range of markets, including financial services, aerospace, automotive, petroleum, life sciences, government, academia and digital media, the systems are priced from $25,000 to more than $60,000.

VMware Inc. Chief Technology Officer Stephen Herrod drew a cheer at the VMworld conference Wednesday by announcing plans to bring the next version of the company's VirtualCenter management software to Linux and the iPhone. In a speech opening Day 2 of the VMworld show in Las Vegas, Herrod also described improvements to VMware's core virtual machine technology that should allow businesses to run larger, more demanding applications on virtualized servers.

Carla Schroder says she just "kind of wandered into" her current life as a free software advocate and well-known IT journalist. "I don't have much in the way of formal education. But I've always been mechanically inclined - your classic ripping things apart and figuring out how they work. I think that makes open source a natural fit for me."

shd-tcp-tools provides a collection of tools for port forwarding, load balancing, and rate-limiting TCP connections. They can be useful if you want to offer SSH services but also limit how much of your bandwidth each user can consume, so that a single long-running SCP operation cannot starve the link from your server to the Internet.

We’re still working on this. There’s been a bunch of helpful feedback. We appreciate this. We think we’ve integrated the feedback into something that’s a good solution; different from out last version in both its essence and its presentation and content.

The Shuttleworth Foundation’s open philanthropy fellow, Mark Surman, will be moving to the Mozilla Foundation where he has been appointed executive director and will continue his work in open sourcing philanthropy.

Things go wrong. Hard disks fail and whole servers crash. Luckily, many Linux-based distributions are available to help systems administrators handle minor catastrophes. We looked at four of the most portable, all of which fit on a 210MB mini CD -- SliTaz, Parted Magic, GParted, and RIPLinuX. Each of these distributions is easy to use -- just insert the CD or plug in the USB drive on which it's installed, then boot. Each gives you access to a variety of open source tools that you can use to manage disks, partitions, and files and perform diagnostics and network troubleshooting. These distributions provide most of the tools that you might need in an emergency situation.

If you tallied up the strengths and weaknesses of Linux and Windows, which OS would come out ahead? According to Jack Wallen, superiority in security, flexibility, interoperability, community, and command-line power (among other things) put Linux well ahead. See if you agree with his assessment.

Like a diamond, a digital media player or a rare coin, the latest mini-notebooks are good things in small packages. By squeezing a lot of computing power into a very mobile package at a hard-to-beat price, they are turning the established mobile pecking order on its head. Until recently, the smallest and lightest notebooks commanded the highest price tags. Take, for example, Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 and Apple's MacBook Air -- they each weigh about 3 pounds, sell for between $2,500 and $3,000 and are the envy of travelers the world over.

Although companies can stick their feet into virtual worlds for a mere tens of thousands of dollars, serious return on investment really requires expenditures in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Sibley Verbeck, CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, a virtual worlds software, content and services provider.

Larry Cafiero is sitting in his cluttered office in the Santa Cruz Mountains looking nothing like a revolutionary. Friendly bearded face. Casual blue jeans. Comfy work shirt with the little penguin logo. Yeah, penguin logo. See, Cafiero is a Linux guy. Maybe you know one — or a Linux woman. Maybe you know that to love Linux is to live Linux — that you don't just use free and open-source software, you embrace it and evangelize it. Some more than others.

Although Google Inc. has yet to come up with Mac or Linux editions of its new Chrome browser, CodeWeavers Inc., a company best known for its CrossOver software, has assembled imitations for those operating systems using Google's own source code. St. Paul, Minn.-based CodeWeavers, which sells software that lets Linux or Mac systems run some Windows applications -- notably, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Quicken and a few others -- crafted its CrossOver Chromium browsers using Google's source code and Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API for Unix-like operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Linux.

As reported by Gizmodo, Microsoft and OLPC just announced the first official pilot of XO laptops running Microsoft Windows. I am Lionel Laské, President and co-founder of OLPC France and to be honest it's not really a surprise. We hear from months that the agreement between OLPC and Microsoft will be a good way to win new country deployment.

In this second part of my survey I list and briefly describe some of the Java sound and music applications known to work under Linux. Java applications show up in almost every category found atlinux-sound.org and theApplications Database at linuxaudio.org. The scalability of the language is well-demonstrated throughout those pages where one can find everything from highly specialized mini-applications to full-size production environments. Of course I can't cover or even present the entire range of Java soundapps, but this survey should give readers a good idea of Java's potential in the sound and music software domain. Again the presentation is in no special order.

Don't get into IT because you want an air-conditioned office. Get into it because it's your passion. Not sure it's your passion? There are a lot of free tools that'll help you explore.

Are you looking to share files online, back up your own data or transfer files between Windows, Mac and Linux systems? Take a look at Dropbox, a terrific online service that just came out of beta mode combines file and folder mirroring/synchronization with an easy-to-use online interface that's efficient and well-designed. You can set up the service on any of your systems (it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux).

The ability to save user settings can come in handy if you want to make your OpenOffice.org solutions more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly. In this article, we take a look at how to save user settings in a plain text file and then retreive them from there. In the very first installment of our ongoing crash course series we talked about how to launch external applications using the OOo Basic Shell function.

Anyone expecting the soon-to-be-launched Google phone to change the market like Apple's iPhone has over the past year will likely be disappointed -- for now. Industry insiders who have worked on Google's Android mobile operating system say it will struggle in the near term to match the consumer enthusiasm generated by Apple when its iPhone redefined the touch-screen phone market and greatly improved mobile Web surfing.

OpenEMR HQ announced today that it has posted the firstpublic screenshots of its upcoming software release called Phoenix to aspecial area of its website specially set up as a resource for those interested in the project.